With the rapid growth of the global Internet, the basic idea of two computers communicating over a network has evolved into a vest network of user nodes, routers, bridges, and servers. Electronic mail over such a network is rapidly becoming the preferred way many people communicate with others. Electronic mail facilitates communicating with those in the next room, in the house next door and across the globe in another country. It has become a staple means of communication in the business environment as well as at home. For example, business memos are now often sent via text within an electronic mail message (“email”) and at the same time greatly anticipated news of a newborn may be sent to relatives in many different locations using email.
Email of today is typically text-only with the ability to add content via file attachments. Email is conventionally transmitted and received using standard mail protocols, such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP), respectively. SMTP is a protocol for sending email messages between mail servers within a network. Most email systems that send email over the global Internet use SMTP to send messages from one mail server to another. The email messages are retrieved using POP or other mail protocols, such as the newer Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
One of the problems with today's conventional email delivery paradigm is that email is delivered in bulk from the sender's email program to a mail server on the network, and then finally to the intended recipient's mail server and mail client as a single, discrete transmission. When a sender desires to send a message with multimedia content, the sender is usually required to include the multimedia content as a separate file attachment to the email message. Given that such content is relatively large, this forces the email message to become undesirably large and requires an annoying amount of time to download. Furthermore, the core text message is not allowed to become an integrated part of a multimedia content viewed by the intended recipient.
Several companies are known to offer users a limited ability to enhance email messages with some form of rich media content. Rockettalk, Signaturemail and some electronic greeting card services, such as Blue Mountain Arts, provide customers with such a limited ability to enhance email with content, but all rely upon file attachments or hyperlinks to web pages outside the confines of the email message.
Rockettalk provides a service that allows users to record audio content and email that content as the message itself. However, the resulting email message cannot include any other multimedia content or even text. This is considered by some to be a less than robust solution to providing rich content messaging. Additionally, if the audio message is lengthy, the email message itself grows to an undesirable size.
Signaturemail provides a service that allows content as part of an email message by facilitating the inclusion of a signature block on the bottom of an email or sending a voice message by email. Unfortunately, this is only a single feature set instead of a robust tool that can integrate a variety of multimedia content elements into an email message. Furthermore, including such content as part of the message (i.e., a file attachment) still allows the message to grow to a burdensome and undesirable size for downloading.
Others have attempted to send multimedia content with HTML direct marketing solutions using email. For example, companies such as Messagemedia, Exactis, and Digital Impact are known to offer comprehensive direct marketing solutions using HTML files emailed to prospective customers. However, simply including the HTML file along with the multimedia content attached to the email message does not resolve the issue with delivering large, content-rich messages.
Another possible solution has been to send such large, content-rich information in multiple pieces through the network and re-assemble it on the intended recipient's system. A new markup language called Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) enables Web developers to divide multimedia content into separate files and streams (audio, video, text, and images), send them to a user's computer individually, and then have them displayed together as if they were a single multimedia stream. SMIL is based upon eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and is related to how web content can be delivered. However, SMIL is focused on web serving and not individual communications or email messaging. Furthermore, it still requires an undesirably large email message (albeit in parts) to be received by the intended recipient. The same information is required to be downloaded through the network's mail servers and then reassembled causing the need for additional processing and annoying wait periods on the recipient's end.
Additionally, Radical Mail is known to offer a bulk mail solution that stages content on a server within the network and then bulk mails messages that provide a link or reference to that content. However, Radical Mail does not allow for individual communication content to be dynamically and intelligently positioned within the network.
One company, called Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., has discovered a way in which to deliver multimedia content in a distributed fashion for use by users logging into websites. Essentially, Akamai provides distributed web caches of content so that users are not logging into a single web content server and causing congestion and poor interactive performance when many users attempt to access the single web content server. The content distributed to Akamai's servers is static and broadcast to multiple servers. In this manner, the serving load is distributed to avoid congestion of a single web server and ultimately to improve the interactive performance of the website. When a user requests the content of such a website, the Akamai system intelligently determines which of the multiple copies of the content stored on Akamai servers to access for delivery to the user.
Unfortunately, the Akamai model of having the same static content maintained on multiple servers for delivery to a requesting user does not resolve the problems noted above with content-rich email message delivery. First, the Akamai model is focused on web content delivery and does not readily translate into a solution for email message delivery. For most email messages, the multimedia content associated with the message is only used once or twice by a potential recipient. The Akamai model becomes problematic for email content used that is only infrequently used because redundantly placing the multimedia content of a large number of email messages onto a large number of servers is time consuming, memory wasteful, and inefficient. Memory storage for each server and network bandwidth is simply wasted broadcasting all of this multimedia content out when it is only used a few times.
Accordingly, there remains a need for delivering content that is less frequently used. More particularly, there is a need for methods and systems that provide a comprehensive solution for receiving and viewing content-rich communications and messages that enable efficient delivery of such messages while avoiding the need for large downloads and issues with latency.